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Chapter Fifty-Five
The Crown dispatch boat from Lynx came out of the central terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction in a blue lightning flash of transit energy. It seemed small and insignificant, lost amid the stupendous, lumbering freighters and passenger ships, but its imperiously strident transponder had priority over them all. Astro Control juggled arrival and departure queues, clearing a path for it, and it streaked towards Home Fleet's flagship under almost eight hundred gravities of acceleration.
It looked even tinier as it decelerated just as furiously to a zero/zero intercept with the massive SD(P), but appearances were deceiving. Tiny as it was, that dispatch boat carried the message that would set millions upon millions of tons of warships into motion.
"What sort of raw meat do you people feed your cruiser captains, Hamish?" Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore inquired acidly.
"With all due respect, Your Majesty," First Lord of Admiralty Hamish Alexander, Admiral of the Green (retired) and thirteenth Earl of White Haven, said with unusual formality to the woman he'd known since she was an infant, "that's not really fair."
"On the contrary, Ham," his brother, William Alexander, Lord Alexander, the recently created Baron of Grantville and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, said tartly, "I think Elizabeth has an excellent point. We already have one war, and it's not going all that well. Do we really need to provoke another one with the Solarian League ?"
"Your Majesty, Mr. Prime Minister, I agree the timing could have been better," Sir Thomas Caparelli, First Space Lord and the uniformed commander-in-chief of the Royal Manticoran Navy, rumbled in a deceptively mild tone. "On the other hand, having read Admiral Khumalo's dispatches and gone over Terekhov's report with Pat Givens, I don't think Terekhov had a great deal of choice."
"Possibly-probably-not, but I have to admit I wish he'd at least consulted with Baroness Medusa before he went dashing off to violate Monican territorial space. Someone with his Foreign Office experience has to be aware of the laser heads he's juggling here!" Sir Anthony Langtry, Manticore's Foreign Secretary, had been a highly decorated Marine once upon a time, and he looked like a man caught between his political and military instincts.
"That's certainly true," Baron Grantville agreed grimly. "The political situation in the Talbott Cluster's complex enough without throwing a spa
"Fair's fair, Willie," Elizabeth said a trifle unwillingly. She reached up to caress the ears of the treecat stretched across the back of her chair, and her expression eased... a little. "The political situation's improved enormously in the last couple of months, and from Dame Estelle's messages, it seems pretty evident Terekhov and Van Dort are responsible for that, as well."
"Despite Augustus Khumalo," Caparelli agreed sourly.
"I'm begi
"Should I understand from that that you think Terekhov knows what the hell he's doing?" Grantville asked, and his brother cocked his head to one side for a moment, then nodded slowly.
"Yes," he said judiciously, "I think I do. At any rate, I'm not prepared to second-guess him from here. He's the man on the spot, and whether he's right or wrong, he's demonstrated the moral courage to make the hard call."
"Hamish," the Queen said more calmly, but with a worried expression, still stroking the 'cat, "I entirely agree that we have to know, one way or the other, what-if anything-Monica and Mesa are up to. I shudder every time I think of how the League's going to react to Terekhov's little act of piracy, but under the circumstances, I could even condone that. It's the rest of his actions, his willingness to court a shooting incident with a sovereign star nation with such a close client relationship with Frontier Security, that scares hell out of me."
"First of all, Elizabeth," White Haven said, "he's very carefully set this up to give you an out by sacrificing him. Second, if he's right, we've already got a shooting incident with the sovereign star nation in question-it just hasn't happened yet. And, third, there's no way in the universe 'President Tyler' would've signed on to risk something like this without the tacit approval of Frontier Security. So, assuming Terekhov is right, the only real change is going to be whose backyard the shooting takes place in. And, possibly, who gets shot."
"Hamish is right, Your Majesty," Langtry said. "And I have to say this, too. There are huge holes in what Terekhov's put together, but just on the basis of what he's already been able to prove, this stinks to high heaven. I pulled the intelligence bio on Lorcan Verrochio, the Frontier Security Commissioner in the region. We don't have as much detail as I'd like, but there's no question that he's inside Mesa's pocket. There were even suggestions in that heap of data Anton Zilwicki dropped on us a few years back that he's directly involved in payoffs to protect the slave trade. If Jessyk is involved, you can be absolutely certain they're operating with Verrochio's knowledge and consent."
"Wonderful," Grantville sighed. "So we probably are looking at direct Solarian involvement."
"Yes and no, Willie," White Haven said. "From what Tony's saying, OFS is involved. That's not the same thing as the League's being involved. It's not even the same as having all of Frontier Security involved. Verrochio has his own little satrapy down on the Cluster's southern frontier. Whether or not he can count on support from his fellow OFS satraps or the SLN's an open question, and it probably depends on how deeply-and publicly-into the cookie jar he has his fingers."
"Either way, Your Majesty, there's nothing we can do to undo what Terekhov's already done," Caparelli observed, pulling the discussion back to its primary focus. "All we can really do is determine how to respond to it."
"What's the Admiralty's serious estimation of how likely we are to see a response from the Solarian Navy to an attack on Monica, Ham?" Grantville asked.
"In the short term, that may well depend on how willing we are to reinforce Lynx and the Cluster. Khumalo's present strength is so low the local SLN forces assigned to support OFS could probably take him without heavy losses. If we reinforce with a squadron or two of modern capital ships, though, we can ensure that Commissioner Verrochio would have to ask for substantial reinforcements to have any hope of taking us out. And, as I say, at that point it comes down to how much Verrochio himself is willing to risk and how likely anyone else is to want to jump into this with him. If we make it obvious that it's going to cost far more than the League can expect to make back off of the Cluster, the odds of his getting any support ought to go down sharply."
"That's true, My Lord," Caparelli said. "On the other hand, I'm not comfortable about the notion of diverting sufficient strength to Talbott to be a realistic deterrent. Not when we're still stretched so tight at the front. We've finally gotten Eighth Fleet reinforced to a level that will let Duchess Harrington shift from a purely defensive stance to a limited offensive one. I'd hate for this to turn into a diversion that would push her entirely back onto the defensive."
"Agreed," White Haven said grimly, remembering the endless months when he'd been the one in command of Eighth Fleet, waiting for reinforcements that never seemed to come. And he had a special, deeply personal reason for ensuring that Eighth Fleet's present commander got everything she needed before she went into battle.
"Nonetheless," he went on, "I think we're going to have to divert at least some strength to Talbott. Suppose we sent a couple of battlecruiser squadrons and a single CLAC squadron to the Cluster proper and moved two SD(P) squadrons and another squadron of CLACs from Home Fleet to the Lynx Terminus?"
"Play a shell game with them through the Junction?" Caparelli said thoughtfully.
"Yes." White Haven grimaced. "I don't really like it. Theoretically, it's elegant enough, I suppose, but if we find ourselves forced to move the Home Fleet detachment further into the Cluster, we lose the ability to recall it quickly in an emergency. And if push came to shove, we could find ourselves in a situation where we'd have to recall the detachment regardless of the exposure for Lynx or the Cluster because of a possible threat to the home system."
"The Lynx Terminus forts will come on-line starting in another few months," Caparelli pointed out. "Once they can take responsibility for protecting the terminus itself, we could withdraw the heavy squadrons and probably make up the combat differential for the Cluster itself with additional cruisers and battlecruisers. And if the a
White Haven nodded slowly, lips pursed as he considered options and scenarios. Caparelli's proposal sounded like their best bet. And, he reminded himself, Caparelli was First Space Lord. Operational decisions were properly his, however hard it was for his political superior to keep his own spoon out of the soup.
"It's an operational decision, Your Majesty," he said, looking at the Queen. "As such, it's Admiral Caparelli's bailiwick. For what it's worth, I'd say it sounds like the most workable option, and I'll endorse it officially in my capacity as First Lord."
Caparelli said nothing, but his expression showed his appreciation for how difficult it was for a flag officer of White Haven's experience and stature to refrain from jostling his uniformed subordinate's elbow at a time like this.